Thursday, October 7, 2010

It is the end of Syawal of the Muslim's month in the lunar calendar. It is also the changing of season, opening the door to winter.Here at the place where I lived in Taif, the seasons starts off with the picking of grapes and pomegranates.Everyday the locals picks up the fruits and sell them to the Capital city.The small green grapes are dried under the sun to become raisin, which later on becomes filling of local breads. While the bigger shining excellent condition arepacked and deliver to the customer around Saudi.While pomegranate fruits are ruby red with small sizes sparkling ruby color sweet inside. In my home country we use to call it "buah delima". Pomegranates are Iran and Himalayan origin brought by the traders along the silk trade route to Saudi. It is a good source of vitamin C and the Sauds loves it. The pomegranate fruit is usually eaten as salad along with grapes and mayonnaise.

Friday, October 1, 2010

A very malicious virus has spread through out network industrial computer in resent days. The virus itself is a refined trojan know as Stuxnet. Some speculated that the virus is specially made and targeted at Iran especially for its nuclear reactor at Bushehr.

The Stuxnet "Trojan worm" was designed to attack industrial control systems produced by Siemen's AG, which are commonly used to manage water supplies, oil rigs, power plants and other industrial facilities.According to Symantec, 60% infected world wide is in Iran and some in Pakistan, India and now Indonesia.It spreads from USB devices and exploits a vulnerability in Microsoft Corp's Windows operating system specially the unlicensed. Once the worm infects a system, it sets up communications with a remote server computer that can be used to steal data or take control of the system.Speculation are targeted at Israel which admitted earlier to have the capability to lunch a cyber attack to Iran. Also the US which at odd with Iran's nuclear capability.Fred Burton, a former US counter terrorism agent and vice-president of risk consultancy Stratfor, said he suspected Stuxnet was a covert action on the part of a nation state intelligence service in an effort to disrupt Iranian military or nuclear efforts.Some experts also commented that search term in the internet about Stuxnet lead to boobytraped sites with Stuxnet virus. So be aware.Now Siemen is offering free assistance site for downloading the antivirus.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Tagsstuxnet virus, dangerous virus, industrial virus, siemen virus, stuxnet siemen, siemen stuxnet, stuxnet antivirus, iran nuclear, iran reactor, bushehr reactor, iran virus, nuclear reactor iran, virus attacks iran, cyber war, cyber war israel

Thursday, September 23, 2010

Couple of hours ago I received an urgent posting from abc News which warns us that a virus is spreading through the Facebook's network. "They have also wreaked havoc for me and several of my friends' computers. It usually happens with new users who aren't aware and teens that click on every thing" Rechelle Harrion commented in abc News status post.

The virus spreaded through Facebook IM saying "lol, is this you" followed by a link. DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK !!!!, because it is a door knob to spread the virus to your computer. The virus access you Friends data and spread out to all your friend in the Facebook.

So how do we deal with it, here is a good comment from a friend. "I did hear about a virus going around on fb but I had no idea how many there were out there but I guess we gotta expect these things because fb is a part of the internet and with that comes hackers,virus and i know friends of mine have had their fb accounts hacked into as well. We just have to be more aware of what we do here to protect ourselves and our friends from unwanted virus etc thanxs for the heads up abc news:)" according to Charmaine Nefertiti Conaghty."Never click on links you didn't request or are from people you don't know. Same goes for your regular email. Common sense people, curiosity isn't worth what these hacker f--ktards are spreading". Great advise from Martin Matthes.Like he just commented, I guess we must be careful about opening links unknown to us.

Monday, September 20, 2010

There are many dishonest people out there in the virtual world who take advantage through the internet connectivity to your computer. They slipped in malicious software such as spyware, pop-up ads, malware into your computer without you ever noticing, especially with a weak antivirus, turned of firewall or turned off pop-up blocker.Software download is the most common risk of virus infection in your computer, which then eventually disable it or slipped out valuable information such as your bank account no, passwords or valuable data available in your computer.How did they do it in the first place? Very simple actually, they look for crowds in the virtual world. They are using most commonly used search term, such as "free games download","free ringtones download", "free Mp3 download", "online games","antivirus download","free registry cleaner","free rank widget","web visitor counter","free porn download", many more.In order to be safe from virtual world viral infection, keep your operating system updated, firewall and pop-up blocker on. Also don't forget to install antivirus and keep updating it.

Saturday, September 18, 2010

The Acid3 test (wikipedia) is written and develop by Google's employee Ian Hickson, which tests the performance of browser compliance to elements such as DOM (Document Object Model) and Java script. The third version is upgraded from the first and second, which complies and focuses on interactive modern technologies such as Web2.0, ECMA script(java script), DOM level2 and CSS3. Which all of these available inside Firefox 4 Beta and Internet Explorer9 Beta.Since I don't have IE9 Beta in my computer (see why), I used results from official Microsoft sites test result as a reference to my own test I am about to perform.Below is the result taken from official Microsoft's site, IE9 Beta acid3 test result.

IE9 Acid3 test result from Microsoft official site

Before doing Acid3 test, make sure that the browser is in its default setting, which mean raw without any modification what so ever. Then go to Acid3 test official site and instantly the result will be shown.The result of my own Acid3 test on Firefox 4 Beta is..........

I was amazed by the result, my Firefox 4 Beta outranked the IE9 Beta's result by two points. The result shows that Firefox 4 Beta complies to the Acid3 test standard better, especially to java scripts.After seeing this result, I think, I will be faithful to my Firefox 4 Beta. (F4 Beta download)

Today I wanted to tryout the new released version of Internet Explorer which IE9 Beta. After browsing around the Microsoft website, I found the link for downloading IE9 Beta. When I came to selecting the computer's operating system, I was amazed and confused. There was no option for Windows XP operating system.

So, I tried downloading it anyway, I choose Vista 32-bit because my XP is 32-bit OS. After 19Mb of waiting the installation failed instantly when run. Check out yourself (download link to Microsoft).Later on I found out that Microsoft is barring xp users from using IE9 Beta which is only built for Vista Sp2 above.In the marketing term, Microsoft is killing 53% world wide XP users to 22% Window 7. This will eventually dumped IE9 for XP because of the exclusiveness to Vista and W7. This will also damage the current reputation of Internet Explorer which is used 60.4% world wide, compare to Firefox 22.93% and Chrome 7.52% according to msnbc.com.Well...I guess, I will sticks to my reliable Firefox 4 Beta.

Thursday, September 16, 2010

In this second part of Lightening the weight of blog post pictures is by changing the picture format or by compressing the image using Microsoft Office Picture Manager. Here is one example :

This image is weighing 0.98 Mb (980Kb) (.BMP format)

So, just imagine how heavy if each post contain 3 or 5 of these heavy weight pictures. Therefore in order to make the post as lite as possible, each picture must weigh about below 150 Kb without decreasing the original dimension of each picture.Microsoft Office Picture Manager is a build in program to support other MS Office programs such as Words or Excell. MS Office is commonly found around the world.So, here what we are going to do.

Before uploading a picture in to the web, it is very important to check the weight of the picture. Is it just a few Kb or a heavy weight as much as Mb.

If the picture is too heavy, decrease the weight to just a few Kb using MS Office Picture Manager or other available programs.

Here how it works using MS Office Picture Manager :

Open the picture using MS Office Picture Manager.Click File - Export, Immediately an export bar appear on the right side of the screen. At Export with this file format change it to .jpg, then Export using this size choose Original size. The result is the picture weight decreases to just 91.7 Kb without decreasing the image dimension.

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

I have many friends, who loves photography, painting, designer clothing, modelling and cooking. All these blogs involve lots and lots of photos being uploaded into their blogs. But that is not the problem, because all of these pictures are excellent quality pictures decorating their blogs and some of them are promoted to be sold online. The main problem is, the blog become heavy to load. When someone is visiting, becomes frustrated because it takes time to see its content. Especially if that someone is having slow internet connection. I can assure, that someone will skip the heavily content blog. What a waste, especially if that blog is promoting products online.So, what is the solution ?Sometimes ago I used a widget called LinkWithin. It is a free widget and works by showing your previous contents' pictures link. See example below, it belongs to one of my friend.

After inserting codes provided by LinkWithin, all your previous content's picture will be shown at the bottom of every past and present post. These picture links are clickable, warping you to old posts inside the web site or blog.After installing the LinkWithin widget, go to your Blogger's Dashboard - Design - Page Elements - Edit (Blog Post). Configure Blog Post, change the "No of Post on Main Page" to less than 7 post per page. If each of your total pictures in each post is weighing 1-2 Mb, change the it to 1 or 2 post per page.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Couple of years ago as a rookie many of my friends and I in the blog world faced difficulties on getting noticed by ads companies in order for us to make money online writing reviews. Alas we were not qualify enough with our capabilities nor our popularity in the virtual world. After some browsing and asking too many questions to great webmasters, I finally understood. Now I am going to share it with you what I had learned. I can assure you that this strategy works, because it did with me.

When I talked with these great webmasters, their first question was always........

"So...., what's the original purpose of blogging at your sites ? Is it for making friends or other social interaction, or for making money. Well if your blog is for making money, which is usually for ads or reviews thingies, you must pay attention to your ranking status".

Beside Google PR( Page Rank ), Alexa Rank is widely use by many online ads companies to measure your blog success in gathering crowds visiting your blog/site. The more crowds visited, the lower the Alexa Rank will be and the higher the Google PR will be.

Well I am not too keen about Google PR, cause it's algorithmically complicated to achieve, but if you are consistent with blogging, you will get there.

In this article, I am focusing only on Alexa Rank and how to achieve it.

Many of of these ads companies ( Text Link ads, Sponsoredreviews, BuyBlogReviews, Blogsvertise ) are depending on Alexa Rank requirement, which are mostly below 1 000 000. But before we get any further, first we must understand on how the Alexa Ranks gets it's number.

Let's put it simple, the Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases its ranking scheme on the level of traffic each website receives from the number of people who visit a website with the Alexa toolbar or Alexa widget installed.

The traffic rank is based on three months of aggregated historical traffic data from millions of Alexa Toolbar users and is a combined measure of page views and users (reach). As a first step, Alexa computes the reach and number of page views for all sites on the Web on a daily basis.The main Alexa traffic rank is based on the geometric mean of these two quantities averaged over time (so that the rank of a site reflects both the number of users who visit that site as well as the number of pages on the site viewed by those users)

So in a dumbest way, the more people with Alexa tool bar or widget visits our site, the better our Alexa Rank will be. Huh.........Well I guess, I have to believe them cause they are the experts on Alexa.Well it kept me thinking for a while, then some ideas came to me.

Promote the Alexa widgets. If you guys and gals never seen one, it looks like this

Invites our friends to install the widgets.

Invites our friends with the widget visit us and us visit them.Not just visits, but serious visit, commenting their works not on their shout boxes.

After browsing around, I discovered that many of Asian blogs (South East Asia, South Asia) had their Alexa already install, most of them installed the widget just to decorate and show off that their blogs had many visitors. They are not aware of serious money involves. So, lets visit them he....he...he......

Well I guess those are just about all I could think of, if you have some more ideas. Please tell me.So let us use the Alexa widget and toolbar and start visiting among us and bloggers with the widget installed, so we can be ready in short 3 months period (common requirement for blog age to be excepted by the ads companies) to make money online.

The main question is, what do you want to do with your blog ? Is it for making money or just for fun blogging ? If it is for fun blogging, all you have to do is posting and posting without any concern about Google pagerank nor Alexa rank. But if you your blog is for making money, then you have to be concerned about pageranks. In order to get good pagerank from Uncle Google and Aunty Alexa, you must understand the basic knowledge of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) which are Nofollow or Dofollow status of yours or your friends sites or blogs.

NofollowIt means that any hyperlink in the site is restricting search engine for giving any credibility or algorithm points to any out bound links which is bad for pagerank because you don't get any scores out of it.If your blog is just for fun blogging, it becomes an advantage because :

Spammer will not come to attack your site, because they will not get any backlink (out bound algorithm points) out of it.

Honest people will come to your site giving honest opinions or comments.

Comments moderation are unnecessary because most of them are honest opinions or comments.

Your site will not give any algorithm points to any site linking with your site.

If your site is for making money with a Dofollow status, it is a disadvantage when linking with this kind of sites or blogs.

DofollowIt means that hyperlinks in the site or blog is giving influence or algorithm points to outside links by unrestricted search search engine for going through all your site links and other links which are linking outside.The advantages are :

Lot of comments coming to your blog for backlink traffic.

You will get lot of visitor coming which increases your page viewed and therefore increases your site pagerank.

People will buy link to your site.

Dofollow site is good for making money because many visitors come to your site, which mean audiences, which mean money. But the disadvantage of a dofollow status site is that you will get many spammer coming to you, which is why moderation is necessary to prevent such attack.

Monday, September 13, 2010

There are many sources ideas you can find for your posting. There are the good old newspaper, library, world around you or the internet. Many people now days prefer the internet for their source of information. Even the good old newspapers and libraries are going online. All of these information sources are supported with feeds, which are updated 24/7 with out stopping. We can tap into these feeds, by subscribing through e-mail, widget or other medias such as the Facebook.My present source of ideas are mainly come from inside the Facebook supported by application known as Networkedblogs. Inside the network, it allows you to feed into many site feeds, such as abc news and thousand of sites with valuable source of information just in one screen without pains taking browsing.After reading and researching from many different sources, we probably can figure out what to write for our posting. But let me remind you that copy pasting from your sources is not a good thing to do, because it will hurt your page rank as a future goal.

Three years ago, I started blogging with my first blog which was a mix content blog. At that time I achieved significantly which was PR3 in 3 months time. After achieving such goal, I am experiencing what they might call a blogging burnt out. I have nothing to write and too lazy to find new topic for my posting, because you have to do lots and lots of browsing the internet.

At that time social networking was not so much fun as today. Before you really work extra hard to find audiences. There was Blog Catalog,the shoutmix thingy, entrecard and others which some I am still using. But the real interaction between the audiences and the webmaster were not there. Just visit and follow, visit and follow with out any life in it.

Now, I have more time for blogging again, but this time I still using my old approaches and well as new.

My new approach is using Facebook application NetworkedBlogs. I find it very interesting and interacting too. Just imagine, I get 4 persons to follow my blog in just 3 hours, which was impossible to do in old days. It is remarkable, I can also follow their blogs and reading it with just one click on the site post. Professional bloggers are also there giving you tips and ideas on what to blog. You will never get blogging burnt out.

If I like the blog, I visit it with out Facebook, make comment and blogroll them in my blog. I do not like spammy blogs.

Sunday, September 12, 2010

The Cloth Button template is modified from original Blogger Template combined with Allie Brown's back ground image. Therefore it is editable using Blogger Template designer.

The Template you are about to download is written in a NotePad format. Open the downloaded file in .txt format using Note Pad and then copy paste it into Blogger's template editor window.Download template.Above is the Header of the template. If you prefer to use it, just click the picture, it will warp you the Google's image location. Then just click right onto the picture and save it into your computer.

Saturday, September 11, 2010

The Cloth Button template is modified from original Blogger Template combined with Allie Brown's back ground image. Therefore it is editable using Blogger Template designer.The Template you are about to download is written in a NotePad format. Open the downloaded file in .txt format using Note Pad and then copy paste it into Blogger's template editor window.Download template

Above is the Header of the template. If you prefer to use it, just click the picture, it will warp you the Google's image location. Then just click right onto the picture and save it into your computer.

Friday, September 10, 2010

Minutes ago I have got words from ABC News about a Trojan e-mail virus which spread rapidly at offices around the world.The E-mail subject was "Here you have" and the spam e-mail said "Hello: This is The Document I told you about, you can find it here" and this includes a PDF link.Another version subject was "Just for you" and the mail said " This is The Free Download Sex Movies,you can find it here".Once you click and download from the links, immediately a virus spread throughout your entire computer.The worm appears to be a new malware attack but is similar to the "Anna Kournikova" virus from 2001, which also carried the subject "Here you have." (The virus tricked users into opening an e-mail message supposedly containing a picture of tennis player Anna Kournikova.) according to Security firm Symantec.

Tuesday, September 7, 2010

Optimization of a web page is one important point in search engine optimization scheme. Many of webmasters does not realize that their sites are over populated with widgets and picture links to servers which are slow because of overly populated.

When you visit a web site, you will notice at bottom left of your browser, links that are associated with the web site being crawl and uploaded into your computer so enable you later on to see what are inside the web site.

Sometimes you will notice that as your browser crawled, certain links of a site is being repeated over and over again. This reading and verifying takes longer time and sometimes you get bore of it and just skip the site and go to other sites which take faster to load.

So the chance of being visited is less and this really hurt your site rank in the virtual world because your site takes time to load.

So this is what you must do:

Check your widgets. Some webmasters love to add widgets to beautify their site because of fashion oriented, but as a function, the widgets really hurt the site. So throw away unnecessary widgets “Keep it Lite and Simple”.

Many of us host pictures in sites call bucket thingy. But the server of “picture bucket” what ever you may call it, is over populated and really takes time to read and verify your pictures. This is what I do. I upload my pictures associated to my Parent site into a Blogger site and I call it “My picture Bucket”. The speed of pictures link being uploaded into your Parent side is very fast better than a third party bucket sites.

Make the pictures inside your posting as lite as possible, decreased the pictures’ weight from mega bytes to just a few kilo bytes. It can be don’t by decreasing the size or change their format. You can use Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

Well this are a few examples, the key word is Keep It Lite and Simple, but of course with great non spammy contents. I can assure you that visitors will crawl in like ants to sugar. (How to increase Google Pagerank Easy Way)

Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Days ago I received email from Feedjit on how to increase your Google Pagerank, I found their tips very useful and woukd like to share it with you all.Google Pagerank is widely use by many site owners to measure their sites reputation. It is measure 0 to 10 (0 no quality traffics and 10 huge high quality traffics). It starts off by giving everyone a score of (lets say) one. Then it starts walking through the link structure of the web (or the link graph as it's called in geek speak) calculating who is linking to whom. It figures out your score by looking at who is linking to you and who links to them.The explanation regarding its algorithm itself is too exhausful to explain, so here is the summarized version on how to get high Pagerank through quality links.

Never link your site to a low quality spammy site. Google will flagged you as part of bad neighborhood.

Good link must come from good quality website or good neighbourhood. Good quality does not mean that the site you are linking to has high page rank. But the important thing is that the site has good quality content, unik and original.

Focus on getting links if possible related to your site. 70% of your site links must be related to your site. If a good high quality site wants to link with you, never turn down the request although the site’s content itself is not related to yours. But keep focus on link building to sites related to yours.

Only link to a high quality site no matter how badly someone wants to link with you.

Content with link texts is very effective way people will immediately see the links and often clicked them, because they want to understand more about the story related to your content.

One last note: If someone links to you, make sure they're not including a nofollow attribute. That will cause the link to not pass any pagerank to your site.

Friday, August 20, 2010

It is not the first time PT. Kereta Api Indonesia state run train service propose such program. Back in the end of the 90's, I remembered the state train service had done the same program, but it did not work according to plan because of weak security and budget which fail to segregate the women passengers from the men. I remembered, during the rush hour in the morning and evening, the train waiting platform was full with mix gender people. When the train arrived, there are no control, everyone just rushed in into the carriages, even though it was marked Women only.

I hope the new generation of service supported with excellent budget and security, women can travel in comfort with out being harrased sexually.

If I may suggest, state train service must build a special platform for the ladies, this makes it easier for them to enter the train carriages marked specially for them.

Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Salmonella (S) is a genus name for a group of large number type of bacteria, which each of the type is differ by a distinct specific protein coating and each type is related to one another. The bacteria itself is rod shaped and known to cause desease on human, animals and birds (poultry especially).The bacteria spreads to people through ingestion of contaminate food. Contamination can come from animal or human feces that contact the foods during harvest. In which in this present case raw eggs.Salmonella poisoning causes gastroenteritis which characterized by nausea, vomiting and diarrhea. Abdominal cramping may also occur.Although such food poisoning is a mild deases, nausea, vomiting and diarrhea can cause dehydration which can cause death.Treatment for enteritis or food poisoning is controversial. Some doctors recommend no antibiotics since the disease is self-limited, while others suggest using antibiotics such as ciprofloxacin for 10-14 days. Patients identified as immunosuppressed (for example, patients with AIDS or undergoing cancer chemotherapy) should receive antibiotics. Some investigators believe antibiotics prolong the carrier state.

Salmonella infection can be prevented by washing hands with soap and hot water after handling raw eggs, raw meat or any animal products.

Park51 project is a Mosque building project in the center of New York city which is located 2 blocks away from Ground Zero September 11 attack. The developers have planned a 13-story, $100 million Islamic community center, complete with a pool, gym and 500-seat auditorium, of which the mosque would be a part.The project itself is funded by Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf who had worked in the past to improve the relation between Islam and the west.The project sparks controversial issues such as the 9/11 attacked by the Muslim extremist which until present days still sparks anger to the American.The Governor of NYC David Paterson is said to have stepped in into the issues and proposing another location which is own by the government.But Mr. Rauf said that the mosque is on private property and funded privately, therefore no one has the right to move location away. He also stated that lower Manhattan Moslems are in urgent need of a Mosque which is fortunate enough to be near with Ground Zero.Read more

Tuesday, August 17, 2010

Sometime ago I had this problem for not able to open my Gmail or Yahoo mail. I was so confuse, in Indonesia I had no problem what so ever in opening my mail anywhere in the country. But here suddently in Saudi, I cannot open all my email.My computer is new, internet connection also new. I am using Zain as my broadband internet provider.So what's wrong with my computer, I sometimes had problem going into Google and Yahoo. At first I tought my Windows and Internet Explorer was going berserk. So I intall a new Windows into the computer, the result is the same.I search the internet and come across a solution which discribe what I have been going through.It's titled and from the microsoft support :You receive an error message in Internet Explorer: "Internet Explorer cannot display the webpage"Here is the first thing you must do in case of such problem occur.Method 1: See whether you can view another Web pageTo do this, follow these steps:Start Internet Explorer.In the Address bar at the top of the browser window, enter one of the following addresses:http://www.microsoft.com/http://www.msn.com/http://support.microsoft.com/If you do not receive a similar error message after you enter one of these addresses in the Address bar, contact the owner of the Web site where you see the problem. The site may be temporarily offline or experiencing other issues.Realising that the problem was not from the IE, I called the Internet provider for explainations. After a long conversation we come to a conclusion that the problem is with the unstable internet signal or the broadband signal si weak in my room.

But of course they will not tell you that they have bad server connectivities.

Couple of days after the phone call, I try to open Yahoo and Google to my surprise, everything work out just fine. I guess the problem was not from my computer or the program I am using, but the issues was with the internet provider and the connectivities.

Monday, August 16, 2010

Welcome to my new blog. The blog is titled "Virtualust" because I love the internet. I am currently stationed in Saudi Arabia in the city of Taif to be exact. Currently I work in informal sector unlike my Philippino friends which mostly work in formal sector such as hospital and others.

Well I have been here for the past 9 months and I found that the culture is somewhat different, but in the religious way it is the same because I am a moslem.